Body Surfing (26 page)

Jeff had left an emptiness, shameful for its timing and its public nature. More astonishing in retrospect was not the fact that Jeff had abandoned her but rather that he had pursued her at all. It seemed a remarkable act of will, a performance running many days, the notices all raves. When she thought he was contemplating algorithms and terrorists, was he, instead, pondering his own treachery? Did he understand each day what he was doing? Or was he operating at a subconscious level that became clear to him only as the wedding drew near? Sydney found it hard to believe in all that dissembling. Scenarios in Montreal and Cambridge had to be played and replayed to watch his face for clues of his subterfuge. And wouldn't Jeff have to have been desperately unhappy, either for himself or for Sydney, assuming that he had cared for her at all? Was she to believe in a single moment of the nearly eleven months she had been with him? Would she have to second-guess all her decisions now?

It was Emily who convinced Sydney to return to school, though she had been leaning in that direction for some weeks. She remembered the research, the classes, the sense of deadline--it seemed to be what was needed. She looked for an apartment near the psychology building where she would be spending most of her time. Rents were high, and she had little money, refusing on principle to tap into a joint account she and Jeff had built together for their future, there being no joint future now. She imagined that in time he would send her some of the money, which he did. No note accompanied the check.

Sydney tried never to think of Jeff or Julie or Mr. Edwards, whose crumpled face she had the most difficulty erasing from her mind. After several weeks of searching, she found a dismal studio apartment just a few blocks from the building in which she would soon immerse herself in work. Unlike most of the returning graduate students, Sydney was so eager for the new term to begin that she arrived an hour early for her first lecture. She was made to understand by her adviser that even more in the way of teaching and research would be expected of her now, which was, she thought, undeserved yet perfect timing. By then, most of the need for solitude had exhausted itself--so much so that she found she could occasionally go out to dinner or to a baseball game with some of her colleagues after work. She had not, however, dated any man since she had had dinner with Mr. Cavalli, which, she thought, did not count as a real date in any universe with which she was familiar. She had gone to a few parties at which there had been men, and some of these men had made initial overtures, but it had been reassuring, if slightly alarming, to learn how quickly these men could be made to turn away. A ducking of the head. A refusal to meet the eyes. A patently weak smile. With Daniel's death, avoiding men had had a different tenor to it: around Sydney, there had been a wall of respect. If men approached her, they were careful, wary, always sympathetic. After Jeff, however, Emily joked that it was as if Sydney gave off negative vibes, and Sydney thought this completely true: vibrations, emanating outward, might prove an effective buffer.

Sydney liked her work, could even occasionally talk herself into thinking of her research as timely and necessary, though she had the normal panicky sense of needing answers more quickly than the scientific method allowed. It was, she thought, a diluted sense of what cancer researchers must feel: an intense need to find a cure before thousands more died. Though her own research was less pressing, she seldom failed to notice at-risk girls on the streets of Boston. They were often overdeveloped, underdressed, very young, and accompanied by older men. In grant proposals, Sydney's goal was to decrease the negative life outcomes for such adolescent girls. Privately, Sydney hoped simply to help save the girls from themselves.

After Jeff had sent the check, having called Sydney's mother for her new address, he had forwarded a bundle of letters from Julie and Mr. Edwards. Sydney had the sense that Jeff was out of the country often, though she resisted calling his department at MIT simply to see if he was listed as an active teaching professor there.

In time, even Julie had stopped writing, discouraged at last by the lack of any reply from her friend, her almost sister-in-law. Sydney had suffered, reading the heartfelt, if artless, missives, yet not as much as she would have had she entered into that correspondence, or, earlier, one with Mr. Edwards, whose brief letters had always ended with an apology, never his to make.

From Jeff, she had heard nothing. From Ben, she had heard nothing. From Mrs. Edwards, Sydney sometimes picked up, like a sudden word amid a sea of static, a distinct if muted sigh of relief.

Sydney wakes to a dog nosing at her foot, and instinctively she snatches her leg away. She sits up, barely conscious. She shields her eyes from the sun and squints in the dog's direction.

"I let him off the leash," a man says.

Sydney feels her body stiffen even before she is fully alert. She can't see the man towering over her, his face backlit by the sun, but she knows well enough who it is.

"Hello," Ben says. "What are you doing here?"

The family never stays after Labor Day. Never.

"What time is it?" Sydney asks, trying to disguise her confusion.

"Eleven-thirty."

"I'm late," she says, standing. Tullus, moving like an agitated horse, bobs around her legs.

"What are you late for?" Ben asks.

"A conference. At UNH. The first presentation is at noon."

"Offhand, I'd say you won't make it."

Sydney bends and scratches Tullus's ears, buying time. Her heart is hammering.

The dog seems satisfied and lopes away. When Sydney straightens, she sees that Ben's white T-shirt is stained with sweat. He appears to have been running. His body is much the same, fully muscled and therefore covered.

"What are you doing here?" she asks, a not entirely illogical question. It is, after all, mid-September. The beach, apart from a few souls out for a walk, is empty.

But Ben seems reluctant to answer her.

"Sydney," he says finally and pauses.

Sydney tilts her head. Why the deliberate use of her name, the unnatural pause, suggesting a pronouncement? "What?" she asks, already beginning to be afraid of his reply.

"My father died."

The news hits her at the back of her knees. Her hands float in front of her, unoccupied. "Oh, Ben," she says.

Ben glances at her and then away. "He had a series of strokes. A meteor shower of strokes really. They left him largely incapacitated. The decline was very fast."

"When?" Sydney asks.

"June."

As if in slow motion, her arms like kites collapsing, Sydney sits in the sand. She draws up her knees and presses her forehead against them. She wraps her arms around her head. Of all people, this should not have happened to the man she will always think of as Mr. Edwards. The man whose letters she did not even bother to answer. The man who was never anything but unfailingly kind to her.

"We're here to clean up the house," Ben explains above her. "My mother sold it. The closing is next week."

"I'm so sorry," Sydney says, a sentence more true than he knows. Or perhaps he does. Ben always had her number.

Sydney cannot keep the cuffs of her black pants from filling up with sand. She stops from time to time to adjust them, rolling them as tightly as she can all the way to her knees. Ben carries her briefcase. In it, she has her computer, her files, her cell phone--inanimate proof that she has made a life elsewhere. Sydney holds her shoes, black pumps with small heels, her trouser socks balled inside. Absurd clothing for a beach.

"Your mother," Sydney says.

"She won't care. Well, she might care, but only for a minute." Ben pauses. "It would make Julie so happy to see you."

When Ben asked Sydney to walk back to the house with him, she considered saying no only briefly. She had asked one question.

"Kenya," Ben had replied. "Except for the funeral, Jeff's been there for a year."

Sydney thinks about the time she suggested in the garden that Mr. Edwards and she one day go to the museum to see the painting he was curious about--the one by the man who had sent three sons to war. She imagined she would be Mr. Edwards's daughter-in-law by then. Why did she not simply call him and do it anyway?

"It happened over several weeks, really," Ben is saying beside her. "At first, we didn't notice. Last Easter, when we were all in Needham, we saw that he seemed to have trouble getting up from a chair. I guessed arthritis, but then I noticed that he also had difficulty walking, as though something were wrong with his mechanics. After that, it was all there for anyone to see: he had trouble eating, he made involuntary gestures with his arm, he couldn't see properly. But you knew my father, Sydney. He would never have let on if he could have helped it. He was always trying to make us feel better."

"And your mother?"

Ben shakes his head. "She's had a rough time of it," he says. "After my father got out of the hospital, we came up here. My mother cooked and cleaned. She had to keep in motion. Sometimes I wanted to yell at her to sit with him, but I learned that each of us has to get through it in his or her own way. There's no rehearsal for any of this."

Sydney thinks about how there was no rehearsal for Daniel's death, how shocking that was. She thinks, too, about the irony of having had a rehearsal for a wedding, but no rehearsal for the pageant that actually unfolded that July morning.

"He died at the house?" Sydney asks.

Ben wipes his forehead with the bottom of his T-shirt. "It's where he wanted to be," he says. "They couldn't stop the strokes. He was surprisingly calm, though sometimes he grew agitated at the loss of his abilities. One day he would be lucid, the next day he seemed to float in a blessed fog. We had my father's hospital bed facing the long windows out to the water. He kept turning his head toward the kitchen, thinking that Jeff was back. The last thing he said before he died was, 'Is that him?'"

"Jeff didn't make it?"

"He made it in time for the funeral."

Sydney briefly closes her eyes. She wants to sit again in the sand. It is too much to take in. Weeks of a man's dying compressed into a few seconds of telling.

"Julie was wonderful," Ben is saying. "I think she couldn't imagine death and so had no fear of it. She saw my father weakening, but she didn't allow herself to take it in. It was a sort of blindness. The actual event was terrible for her."

"Julie's still with Helene?"

"They rented a cottage not far from us." Ben turns and looks for Tullus. "You know, it's hard to clear the life out of a house."

When they reach the house, Ben sets her briefcase on the bottom step. "I'll go in and prepare them, tell them you're here. Then I'll come out and get you. I think it's better that way."

"Ben," Sydney says. "I have questions."

"About my father?"

"Yes, that, too. But. . ."

"I imagine you do. We'll talk."

"And listen," Sydney adds, "if your mother doesn't want me here. . ."

"I know."

"Your father wrote to me, and I didn't answer his letters!" Sydney cries out suddenly. "It's awful when I think about that now. What would it have cost me to answer the man's letters? None of what happened between me and Jeff was his fault."

"He knew that."

"I've missed him."

"I think your wedding day was brutal for him. Not only to watch his son do that to you, but in doing so, to take you away from the family."

Sydney waits on the bottom step, her briefcase on her lap. If she is not welcome at the house, Ben will drive her to her car, and she will return to Boston. She can't imagine sitting through a lecture now, paying attention to a single word.

She waits for nearly twenty minutes, a time that embarrasses her. She hopes Ben has had the sense not to push the notion of Sydney's visit, to let the idea go if his mother is adamantly opposed. But what else can it mean, taking all this time?

She watches a couple in blue windbreakers walking along the wet part of the beach, exposed when the tide is at its lowest. The breeze flattens the thin material to their bodies and blows their hair off their faces. She and Ben walked with the wind, and she didn't feel it as much. Now, sitting on the step, she is chilled. She didn't think to stick a sweater into her briefcase.

Each time Sydney tries to imagine Mr. Edwards's death, her mind veers. She sets the briefcase down and puts her head in her hands. Would it have been so terrible to have called Mr. Edwards and invited him to meet her at the museum, a building so close to her own apartment she could have walked to it? What must he have thought of her refusal to reply to his letters? Her silence would have hurt him; Ben had as much as said so. How could she have been so callous?

She can feel Ben in the vibration of the wooden steps even before he appears on the deck.

"I'm sorry that took so long," he says. "It wasn't that there was any disagreement, I just couldn't find my mother. The house is a mess. Well, obviously."

Julie runs along the boardwalk shouting Sydney's name. The strong girl lifts Sydney up and twirls her around. Sydney cannot help but laugh.

"Where have you been?" Julie scolds as she sets Sydney down. "Why didn't you answer my letters?"